News at Noon

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth granted the injunction because he found that the doctors who challenged the policy would likely succeed because U.S. law blocked federal funding of embryonic stem cell research if the embryos were destroyed.

“(Embryonic stem cell) research is clearly research in which an embryo is destroyed,” Lamberth wrote in a 15-page ruling. The Obama administration could appeal his decision or try to rewrite the guidelines to comply with U.S. law.

Witnesses described a horrific scene of dead bodies throughout the Muna Hotel and guests scrambling to safety by escaping out of windows.

The multi-pronged assault came less than 24 hours after the country’s most dangerous militant group – al-Shabab, a group allied with al-Qaida – threatened a “massive” war against what it labeled as invaders, a reference to the 6,000 African Union troops in Mogadishu.

As a loan officer for a federal agency that was supposed to help homeowners and businesses get back on their feet, he had high expectations he could make a difference. But he recalls how he was forced to turn away many qualified applicants because of what he says was pressure from his supervisors to close files quickly.

Karen Bazile remembers having high hopes, too, when she applied for a loan from the same agency, the Small Business Administration, to rebuild her home in the New Orleans suburb of Chalmette. While she ultimately got the money, she quickly lost faith as she struggled with different loan officers who misplaced her paperwork and told her she had only 48 hours to find and fax critical documents or her application would be canceled.

Raising hopes further, a second bore hole punched into the chamber where the miners are entombed, and a third probe was nearing the spot on Tuesday.

After parceling out tiny bits of food and drinking water carved from the mine floor with a backhoe for 18 days, the miners were getting glucose and rehydration tablets to restore their digestive systems. Capsules carrying oxygen also were sent down through a six-inch (15 centimeter) bore hole to help the men survive the hot, stuffy, humid conditions in the lower reaches of the gold and copper mine.

Mutual interests intersect in the former Cold War battleground. Nearly nine years on, the Taliban-led insurgency is costing the U.S. more lives and money than ever before. With a July 2011 deadline looming for troops to begin their withdrawal, the Obama Administration has been angling for regional partners to step in and shoulder a greater share of the burden. Russia kept a safe distance in the years following the Taliban’s ouster, but it has been stirred to action by two issues: deadly Islamist terror attacks within its borders – inspired in no small part by the ideologies spreading from the war zone on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani frontier – and a spike in drug-related crime and deaths – more than 130,000 each year from heroin alone, most of which originates in Afghanistan.

Over the past year, a series of contact groups from the U.S. and Russia have ramped up intelligence-sharing to combat the flow of narcotics from Afghanistan, the source of about 90% of the world’s heroin. In a June 9 op-ed in the Moscow newspaper Izvestia, Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan, highlighted Russian contributions at length, hailing them as a major step forward in bilateral relations. But while Russia’s intelligence assets in ex-Soviet republics may have a modest impact on combating the trade, myriad other transit routes through Iran and Pakistan will complicate the efforts to curtail the supply line.

With fewer than 140 days left in his term, Schwarzenegger is making a final stand for pension cuts, spending constraints and a tax overhaul that have eluded him for nearly seven years.

The state’s budget is 55 days overdue. But Schwarzenegger has said he won’t sign a spending plan until a hostile Legislature fixes the broken fiscal system.

The hurricane has maximum sustained winds Tuesday near 100 mph (160 kph) and could become a major hurricane by early Wednesday.

Danielle is located about 1,110 miles (1,790 kilometers) east of the Lesser Antilles and is moving west near 20 mph (32 kph).

Meanwhile in the Pacific, Tropical Storm Frank is moving parallel with the coast of southern Mexico. Frank’s maximum sustained winds are near 50 mph (85 kph). The storm is located about 135 miles (220 kilometers) south-southwest of Acapulco, Mexico.

Bumper-to-bumper gridlock spanning for 60 miles (100 kilometers) with vehicles moving little more than a half-mile (one kilometer) a day at one point has improved since this weekend, said Zhang Minghai, director of Zhangjiakou city’s Traffic Management Bureau general office.

Some drivers have been stuck in the jam for five days, China Central Television reported Tuesday. But Zhang said he wasn’t sure when the situation along the Beijing-Zhangjiakou highway would return to normal.

The private Agni Air plane went down near Shikharpur village, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Katmandu, area police chief Ram Bahadur Shrestha said.

The German-built Dornier turboprop airplane was carrying 11 passengers and three crew members. It was headed to Lukla – a popular stop for trekkers and mountaineers – when cloud cover there forced it to turn back to the capital.

The fish were found Sunday floating on the surface of the water and collected in booms that had been deployed to contain oil that leaked from the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Times-Picayune reported.

“By our estimates there were thousands, and I’m talking about 5,000 to 15,000 dead fish,” St Bernard Parish President Craig Taffaro was quoted as saying in a statement.